<h2>Professional Translation Marketplace</h2>

The Worldwide Lexicon is an open source, multi-vendor translation platform. With it, you can translate your website, applications and services using a wide variety of human and machine translation services. In April 2010, we published an open API for <a href=/lsps>language service providers (LSPs)</a> that turns WWL into an open marketplace for on demand professional translation.<p>

Most translation platforms are built by the same companies that offer professional translation services so, not surprisingly, they limit you to hiring their professional translators. The translation industry is a specialist industry. An agency that does excellent work translating to and from Asian languages or in a specific industry is often not very proficient in other areas. The WWL Open Marketplace solves this by enabling you to interact with any combination of service providers, and to mix professional translation with machine translation as well as community generated translations. This flexibility enables you to optimize for quality, speed and cost, and allows you to use one agency for one type of work or language, while using another for other tasks.<p>

<h3>How It Works</h3>

Support for professional translation is integrated with every aspect of the Worldwide Lexicon tools. You can request professional translations whether you are using <a href=/transkit>TransKit</a> (our high performance libraries for software developers), or are using our turnkey translation solutions, such as our <a href=/proxy>proxy server</a>. To enable professional translation, you simply set a few options when you call our system or install one of these modules. Then, WWL handles the rest.<p>

The system is very easy for language service providers to integrate with, and usually requires just a few hours of programming time to implement. Membership in the Worldwide Lexicon Open Marketplace is open to accredited language service providers who either hire professional translators, or have an approved process for qualifying and evaluating freelance translators. <p>

<h3>Specialize By Languages Or By Domain</h3>

Professional translation works best when the translation agency is working in the languages or industry it is most experienced in. Legal translation requires very different skills than to translate a typical newspaper. It is also common for agencies to specialize by regional languages, while it is rare to find agencies that provide broad language coverage, while also providing in depth industry specific knowledge. An open marketplace solves this by enabling you to send translation requests dynamically, and to use any combination of providers (including machine translation where it is appropriate), so that you can maximize quality and speed while minimizing costs.<p>

